The Aspen Account (13 page)

“And his passion was music?”

“Punk rock,” Seaton said with a hint of amusement. “Nick was quite a wild one during the seventies. He was always one of those guys that were unsettled with the relaxation of the sixties—was never interested in disco, of course. But he took to punk right away, even before anyone really knew about it, when it was still confined to this neighborhood.”

“I thought that stuff all started in England.”

Seaton shook his head. “Nah. It went mainstream in England, but its true birth was in New York. Some would argue Detroit, but if you ever argue history with Nick, he’ll claim with his dying breath that the movement developed here.”

“And he’ll know something about Ross?”

“I don’t know. They don’t exactly travel in the same circles anymore. None of us do. Nick’s an odd one, that’s for sure. He started an independent record company here in New York after the three of us split. Been losing money ever since, but he doesn’t care. He can afford it. Apparently, he’s always signing no-name bands that remind him of the glory days of punk. Then he spends a lot of money trying to promote them, but none have ever broken through. Like I said, though, he doesn’t care. It’s more like a
cause
for him. He despises mainstream media. One of those ‘independent music for independent minds’ kind of guys. He likes to refer to himself as ‘the punk missionary,’ like he’s trying to spread the word—that sort of thing.”

“And at one point this guy was a founder of a software company with you?”

“The tech industry attracts all types,” Seaton said with a wry smile. “Ah, here we are. Christ, I haven’t been to this place in a long time. I told him we needed to meet someplace private, and this is what he suggested. That’s Nick for you.”

Marcus looked up at the white turnip that stuck out from the wooden door. Giant red letters stood out on the turnip, announcing “CBGB’s” and “OMFUG” with an unmistakable we-don’t-give-a-shit attitude. It was as if the bar itself were a cocky, disgruntled youth leaning against a brick wall of a bleak city backstreet.

As they entered the bar, the sunlight vanished, and they could hear the strident, raunching tones of a band rehearsing covers from the Ramones. “Beat on the brat with a baseball bat,” were the first words Marcus heard from a screaming kid almost as skinny as the microphone stand he held as he gyrated around onstage. A scratched wooden bar top stretched along the right side of the room, while the left side was crowded with empty tables. The bartender, a big man in his forties with leather straps around both wrists, stared intensely out from behind his draft handles. The walls were covered with so many flyers and advertisements, it was impossible to determine their color.

The two newcomers moved to the back of the bar, where a dozen people in front of the stage shook chaotically to the offbeat vibrations. An older man sat at a table in the far corner, alone and away from the crowd. It was the darkest spot in the room, practically hidden from the entrance. The man’s age made him seem out of place, though he didn’t seem the least bit concerned as he lit a cigarette, illuminating a pale, rough face.

“Hello, Nick,” Seaton said as they reached the table. “Thanks for meeting me.”

“It’s been a long time, Donald,” Nick Kemper said, extending a long arm toward the empty chairs at the table. “How’s business?”

“It’s a handful.”

“Dangerous, too, from what I hear.” Nick nodded toward Marcus. “This the bastard that killed Jack?”

Nick’s hair was cut short, further emphasizing his long face and large, owllike eyes. He wore a drab brown T-shirt underneath a sports jacket. His cigarette dangled loosely between the long fingers of his left hand, and a tumbler of whiskey sat in front of him on the table. His right hand always kept hold of it, even when he was not drinking, as though someone might try to filch it from him at any moment.

His body shook sporadically to the merciless beat of the music. Suddenly he sparkled. “Let’s say you and I get a drink, Donnie! For old times!”

“Nick, I’m not here for a drink. I’m here about Jack. For God’s sake, he tried to
kill
me this afternoon, and now he’s dead.”

“All the more reason to drink!” Nick said, glaring at Marcus with moist, shining eyes.

“Why did he try to kill me, Nick?”

“Well, let’s see, a few reasons come to mind.”

“Damn it, Nick! That was more than twenty years ago! This is something else. I think it has to do with the merger talks with Cygnus. The timing’s too critical on this one. He didn’t do this on his own . . . Someone got to him.”

“And you think someone might have gotten to me, too? You think I’m gonna try to kill you, too? Is that why you brought your goon? Can I expect a complimentary bullet from him as well?”

Seeing the tension build in Nick’s face, Seaton could see that his old friend was telling the truth. It was as if he had been allowed a glimpse, behind the ravages of age and a dissipated life, of a time when they were both young men, when telegrams were sent instead of e-mails, when the nightly news was seen on a black-and-white television, when the world still dreamed of colonies on the moon. Don, Nick, and Jack had all grown up in Brooklyn during the fifties. They had played stickball in the streets together and tried to best each other in every pursuit from athletics to girls. Later, with scholarships to New York University in 1958, Jack had studied management, then got his MBA, while Nick took PhDs in history and philosophy. And Seaton, fascinated by the space race and the dawn of the computer age, had studied astronomy before becoming one of the first in his generation to complete a PhD in an entirely new branch of academics: computer science. And after fifteen years of teaching programming at MIT, he would eventually bring Nick and Jack in to help him pursue his vision.

A particularly loud and discordant guitar riff from the stage brought Seaton out of his reverie, and again he asked his old friend, “Nick, why would Jack want to kill me? I need to know if it had anything to do with the merger.”

“The merger? Why would Jack care about that? Maybe you’ve kind of forgotten what you did to him.”

“We all had to go our own ways, Nick. And anyway, that was a long time ago.”

“Not to Jack, it wasn’t.”

“I can’t believe that!” Seaton shouted, slamming his fist down on the table. But the band was quite a bit louder than one upset billionaire, and no one else in the bar noticed.

Nick shook his head sadly and, releasing his death grip on the glass of Scotch, motioned Seaton closer. “You don’t know, do you?” he croaked in a gravelly voice. “Jack was practically living on the streets.”

Seaton’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about? He was running his own software company!”

“It went bankrupt a year ago. He had problems with his product line—some sort of unexplainable glitch in the design. Lost all his customers within three months. The company was overextended for a massive product expansion, so his overhead was through the roof. He had already maxed out his line of credit with the bank. His only hope was to issue another series of preferred stock, but all the investors got cold feet and backed out at the last moment. He even asked
me
to help him out, but I told him I had my hands full with the record label and couldn’t afford to invest even a fraction of what he needed.”

“Why didn’t he come to me?” Seaton demanded. “I would have helped him.”

“After what you did to push him out of X-Tronic, do you really think he was gonna come to you for help? He would have killed himself before coming to you. You know that.”

Seaton’s fierce gaze lowered as he recalled the first time he had betrayed loyalty for money. “I’m not like that anymore.”

“You’re not the only one who’s changed since those days. I told him he should still go to you, but he wouldn’t hear it.” Nick took a drag from his nonfilter cigarette and chased it with Scotch. An explosive coughing fit overtook him, causing the tumbler to slam back onto the table and sending an ice cube spinning into the ashtray. When the paroxysm finally subsided, he wheezed, “I only saw Jack once after that. It was after he lost his business. He had filed for personal bankruptcy protection, but the court’s auditors found that he had tried to inflate the value of certain company assets before the bankruptcy proceeding, hoping to scare up some additional capital from investors. After that, it was open season. Jack avoided a jail sentence by agreeing to give back most of his personal net worth to his company’s capital pool, to be distributed according to the bankruptcy. His wife divorced him and took his kids. By the time I saw him, he was broken, unrecognizable—just another casualty in the big city. People don’t hire tired old executives with a history of corruption. I gave him some money, but he didn’t want anything else. He had become a drifter . . . a lost soul. He was beyond anyone’s help at that point. When he left, I had the feeling it was the last time I would ever see him. You don’t realize how much he changed after the X-Tronic days . . . Just wasn’t as tough as he used to be.”

“He should have come to me!” Seaton yelled, smashing both fists down on the table, shattering the glass tumbler on the floor. “He should have come to me! I have money—I would have helped!”

This time, his outburst came during a lull in the music, and people in the bar turned to look at them. “Hey!” the burly bartender yelled, coming around the bar. He got within six feet of Seaton before Marcus had him against the wall with a forearm across his throat. 

“Hey, look . . . I don’t want no trouble,” the bartender said meekly.

“We were just leaving,” Marcus replied as he stuffed a fifty in the man’s fleshy hand and relaxed his grip. He turned to Seaton. “Do we have everything we came for, sir?”

Seaton stared at Nick with an anguished despair that he had held inside for twenty-five years. He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. “We were like brothers,” he finally said. “All of us. Weren’t we brothers?”

Nick nodded. “I think that’s why he wanted to kill you himself.”

Seaton shook his head before turning to walk away. After a few steps, he turned back toward Nick. “If you ever fall, if anything ever happens that you need help with, please . . . ask me. I want you to know, you can always ask me for help.”

“Same goes for you, Donnie boy,” Nick said through a rising curl of smoke. “Some of the biggest tragedies in history began with just a couple of gunshots, with just one or two deaths. If this is as big as you think, if this is the last act of some operatic tragedy in your life, I want you to know that you can always consider me your brother . . . even in death. Just like poor Jack.”

22

SEATON AND MARCUS left CBGB’s and returned to the fading sunlight of the street. Not wanting to attract any more attention than necessary, Marcus had instructed the company driver to park the hired limousine out of sight in a side alley. Now, seeing no suspicious activity, he phoned the driver to pick them up.

“What’s the best investigation agency you know in New York?” Seaton asked.

“You mean a private investigator?” 

“No, no—a high-end agency. The kind you use to run background research on political opponents or to uncover business deals between executives.”

“Kostroma International. They’re a Russian-based firm that was founded after the fall of the Soviet Union to help Western executives and investment bankers investigate potential corruption within Russian enterprises before investing in them. Their specialty is corporate espionage. They claim to have a number of ex-KGB agents in their ranks, and they recruit most of their new hires out of various intelligence agencies from around the world. They’ve grown substantially since they were founded in the early nineties. Besides Russia, they do a lot of work in China and Brazil. They don’t have much business in the United States, but they have an office here in New York.”

A gray Lincoln Town Car pulled up in front of them, and Marcus stepped forward and opened the door for Seaton while continuously observing the surrounding streets. Even though the vehicle was bulletproof and as well protected as any commercial vehicle could be, he was still apprehensive of the attention that it drew.

“Let’s go there now,” Seaton said.

“Ralph,” Marcus called to the driver, “take us to the corner of Eighteenth and Broadway.”

“You know exactly where they’re located?” Seaton asked. “How do you know so much about these guys?”

“They tried to recruit me nine months ago.”

Seaton bellowed out an uncharacteristic laugh. “And why didn’t you join them?”

“And miss out on this kind of luxury?” Marcus replied with a wry grin, his eyes roving the plush interior of the limousine. “Seriously, though, what do you want from Kostroma?” 

Seaton looked out the window at the familiar New York streets of his youth. At the mouth of a small side street, a group of boys stopped their game of stickball to admire the flashy Town Car as it rolled past.

“I want to find out exactly what happened to Jack’s business,” he finally answered. “I need to understand every detail to figure out why he tried to kill me. I owe him that much.”

*     *     *

Seaton and his bodyguard stepped off the elevator on the twenty-fifth floor and walked into the gray reception area of Kostroma International. The black marble floor reflected a dim glow from the studio lights spaced along the high ceiling. A thin woman greeted them with an Eastern European accent as they approached the counter that arced around her in a semicircle of flat-screen monitors and information networks. Loud blue eye shadow and blood-red lipstick stood out against her fair skin and blond hair. 

“We’d like to see Darryl Mitchell,” Marcus said.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, but Mr. Mitchell’s schedule is full this evening. We’re not regularly open on Saturday evenings, but at the moment we’re working on a special project. Perhaps I could direct you to one of our risk assessment managers by making an appointment for Monday?”